


Girl in the Gates

by worldturtling



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Pining, The Mummy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25338589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldturtling/pseuds/worldturtling
Summary: Michael needs to return to some place he can't remember, but he needs to find Eleanor first.Mummy Au, Eleanor/Michael implied, unresolved tension Lots of knife drawing.
Relationships: Michael (The Good Place)/Eleanor Shellstrop
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	Girl in the Gates

“How much for the girl?”

“More than you got, moneybags.”

Michael eyes her critically. She’s smirking up at him, a cut on her lower lip, a bruise forming on her right eye, and she wears them like badges. 

“You’ve been to Hamunaptra. You’ve seen the lost city. You’ve seen the gates.”

“Saw a whole lot of bullets too. Slightly more interesting. But yeah bud, got your vision board right here.” She taps the side of her temple as if punctuating her statement. Michael peers at her. He pronounces his words slowly. 

“Do you swear?”

“Every damn day,” she fires off smoothly. But there’s something about the way her eyes flickered when he talks about the gates that makes him think there’s something …almost scared underneath the façade. It might just be enough to convince him. 

A clang brings him to attention as the jailer bangs on the metal bars of her cage with a stick. He has the sensory awareness to see she doesn’t flinch.

“She is a feral child,” the Egyptian jailer tells him like a butcher selling him on another cut of meat. “She means nothing. She’s what we call street rat around here. A scavenger. She would as soon leave you for dead if you had half a coin.”

Michael does his best shoulder shuffle up to bring himself at a towering standstill with the man. He briefly had a visual of a goose fluffing his wings out to ward off predators, and if Janet were here she would be giving him that peaceful smile and slight wince of the eyes that meant she knew exactly what he was doing and why, and yet she couldn’t fathom how he had arrived at the conclusion to do it anyway.

“She means something to me.”

The short man takes a step back, and Michael sees in his eyes that it has worked.

“How much for the girl?” He repeats his statement again. The jailer looks agape between him, the tall archaeologist, and her, the jail’s number one special case. In a den of thieves, men hardened as assassins and crimelords, she alone was the sole female they had made the exception to keep. No one else wanted to deal with her. No one else could.

And neither could they, judging from the way her eyes roved about the cage. Michael had the feeling she could see it just as clearly as he could, where parts were rusting, where bolts might be missing, where, if just enough pressure was applied, you could be free.

But then there was the problem of the giant dessert that stretched thousands of miles between here and anywhere else, and more importantly, here and any sign of water. 

He adjusts his bowtie and tunes back into whatever the jailer is saying which ends up being a series of numbers. He shakes his head and adjusts his glasses.

“Fine.” 

The jailer’s mouth snaps shut, in shock. 

Michael turns and waves to his page boy with the money bag. It’s not as if it was his money anyway. 

-

He’s quick to introduce Eleanor to the rest of the team, mainly Jianyu, the page boy who accompanied them, and Tahani, who stood in the center of her rooms with arms crossed and eyes staring down over her nose at her while not addressing her directly. 

“Michael, I said go to the jail and find the _men_ needed to get us there.” 

Michael pinches the bridge of his nose. To get to Hamunaptra, you needed money, and in order to get money, you needed a wealthy heiress with infinite pockets hoping to find a really good diamond necklace or whatever among the ruined mummy remains. 

Eleanor, who had slept through most of the carriage ride peered up at the heiress much, much taller than her. And honestly, Michael had to admit that her stature did not really inspire confidence. 

“She’s been to the city and we need someone who has been there before to enter the gates.” He emphasized once again, though he’s been through this a hundred times already. He looks down and sees out of the corner of his eye that Eleanor’s eyes shutter close for just a second, maybe less, and her shoulders twitch forward, like she’s trying to let a cold breeze past. He files this information away for later. 

Eleanor’s eyes rove over Tahani. She looks like she’s scanning a book. She unfolds her arms and points a finger. 

“Listen princess,” she’s so much shorter than both of them, but to Michael she looks like a well camouflaged bomb, “I’m probably your only chance of getting to that place alive and in one piece. And I will take you as far as the foot of the gates, but not for less than three thousand.” And for a moment, Eleanor seems to weigh this statement before she clarifies, “Francs.”

Tahani gapes.

“Excuse me… we just paid for your release from jail. You are a miscreant.”

“You wanna get to this place you need me and I’m not risking my life for free.” It becomes painfully apparent that they need her more than she needs them.

And the look on Tahani’s face says she knows it too.

-

And so a wealthy heiress, a recently incarcerated criminal, Michael, and his page boy grab some camels, Eleanor haggling a price for them fluently, and they set off across the sandy planes for the sea to the barge that would take them down the river and hopefully cut this trip shorter than it needed to be.

-

“So,” Michael asks casually over a passive game of cards he’d swindled Eleanor into, ‘how does one such as you, an American, young, a woman, find your way all the way out here?”

Eleanor takes a card and swaps it out, she eyes Michael over her fan.

“Dirtbag father comes here for work, loses all his money real fast, becomes a graverobber, dies, but guess who’s better at breaking into stuff? From there it was mostly convincing other rings I was worth the time till I made a name for myself. Did some bounty hunting for a while. And now I’m here,” She smiles in a sort of executed way, spreading fast like a bullet leaving the chamber. Michael feels himself mirror it back.

“Now you’re here.”

“And that there is a royal flush, friend.” She says in an impossible laying of her cards. Michael swallows tightly as he watches Eleanor collect the coins they had put on the table, and he had already won quite a bit from the crew.

That’s when they hear the first explosion. He regrets to see her hand only moves faster in cinching her leather sac even as she reaches for her gun. 

-

Michael had kind of believed it when he saw her in the prison, but seeing her shoot down obstacles left and right as they escaped the barge truly solidified his choosing her. And it made him endlessly curious. 

There’s a lot of yelling, packing, a series of explosions, and angry men waving weapons, finding Tahani, and Jianyu, and getting into water.

When they finally make it to safety on the right side of the stream, (and he really must give Eleanor credit for pulling that off), she throws him against the ground, and he feels the muscle hiding underneath her tunic shirt pull him like anchors.

As she held a knife to his throat, straddling him, he only looked up with interest at what she would do next. Her teeth gleamed fiercely, too wide to be a smile, and her eyes shone like a predator looking for prey.

“You need to keep your princess’s mouth shut or I walk.” She says finally. In the moonlight, her hair looks more like a halo, her features taking on a porcelain hue.

He feels the sharp edge press deeper into his skin, the closest shave ever given, and he says, “She’s not my princess. You shut her up.”

Eleanor snaps her knife away like a child burned on the stove. 

They look sideways at where Jianyu was bent over Tahani. She had been knocked unconscious by one of the men she’d been telling about her diamond seeking adventure, trying to get them more muscle. Eleanor had thrown her over her shoulder in the water and brought her across, something Michael would have thought an impossible feat with her physical features. 

They wouldn’t be underestimating her again. 

-

Eleanor surveys the man in the bowtie before them. Michael feels somewhat showed up that someone is choosing to wear a bowtie this deep in the dessert. And he wishes he had his own, more impressive one on now.

“So let me get this straight,” she says and the man in glasses and a bowtie looks like he’s getting a little unnerved at last. Good luck, Michael thinks to him. “You, Chodey, are a nerd or something in Hamunwhatever?”

He clenches his fists and says, not for the last time,

“For the last time, I’m a _librarian_ who _protects_ Hamun _aptra_. And my name is Chidi.” And honestly Michael thinks at this point she’s messing up details to fuck with him. It’s almost entertaining if it wasn’t so hot out.

“So you’ve never actually been there.”

Chidi’s nostrils flare.

“No.” It’s like the last white flag finally going up.

“So…you’re a librarian for a place and you don’t even know if that place exists or not.”

If Michael looked up the word ‘murder’ in the dictionary, he suspects the exact expression on Chidi’s face right now would be pictured. And he can’t afford to lose Eleanor. He places a firm hand near the nape of her neck and nudges her back softly, gently surprised at how she wordlessly lets him. He places another hand on Chidi’s shoulder. He puts on his best academic to academic voice.

“I think we all need to rest for the night, and Chidi I’d really love to talk to you about your library.”

When Chidi starts to explain he left his library to protect Hamunaptra, Michael starts to drone him out. 

They decide to set up camp next to Chidi’s hut. It’s only after getting a few drinks into him that they start to get some meat. 

“It’s dangerous, you know.” He’s emphasizing to Tahani and Eleanor. Michael sips on his brandy and watches their faces over the firelight.

“Thousands of men have died there.”

“Yeah dude, old news.” Eleanor says with a bite in her voice, like there’s a competition going here. She never really stops fighting, and Michael wonders at that.

“Chidi, we truly are just here for the pursuit of knowledge,” Tahani says with her most idealistic tone of voice. And Michael in part thinks she really believes that, having funded his expedition on these ideals. But they’ve also spoken quite frankly about the untouched jewels that might lie there, and how they would be prized objects. He thinks about the ego and the superego. Tahani is a paradise of contradictions. 

“I suppose I can’t stop you from that, but plenty of colonizers have tried and died you know.” He emphasizes this at Tahani, and Michael has to quietly balk a laugh. 

Tahani puts a hand to her bosom and stares quietly. Eleanor is still watching Chidi like she’s trying to figure the best way to take him down. 

“What do you know about the gates.” She asks finally. Michael’s ears pique at this. 

Chidi’s grin spreads wide and Michael thinks he doesn’t know it’s happening. The unconscious tics the body makes when overwhelmed by reaction.

“Visible only on the darkest nights to those that know the way? The gates built in blood? The hieroglyphs themselves carved and sealed with blood shed to enter?”

Eleanor looks nonplussed.

“Yeah, those gates.” Chidi’s face is a frozen smile that looks like he knows he’s shown his weakest spot to a jaguar and is living to regret it. Eleanor doesn’t pounce though. Instead, her eyes flicker to Michael briefly, who hides his interest in his brandy cup. “They never appear to anyone who hasn’t seen them?”

“Not unless in the company of someone who’s soul has.” Eleanor peers at him. 

“How does that work? How would anyone even find it in the first place then?”

Chidi shrugs. “Secret keepers, passed down through generations. You or I, more likely I, could be related to someone who knew someone who was descended from someone who showed them the gates once.”

“And the gates are like bam, I know you Chidi here you go?” She’s forgotten to intentionally forget his name, and Michael doesn’t know if she realizes how much her interest is showing. 

“The gates are like…they imprint a map on your mind. There are tales that say if a man who has seen the gates drinks too much, he will wander in the dessert until they find him. Like a honing signal, or like what drives birds to migrate.”

Eleanor stares at her wine, mostly untouched. Michael watches her face stare at the dark liquid, a glimmer of her reflection mirrored back.

“What about the images on the gates. Do those change?” Michael wants to stare intently at her at that moment, wants to know what she knows but he’ll never get any information by appearing obvious. 

Chidi turns quiet.

“How do you know about those?”

“Read it in a book.” She says with the frankness everyone knows is a lie. Chidi feels the need to address this anyway.

“It isn’t written in any book. No one knows about those. Even secret keepers seem wary of that.” Chidi’s voice drifts, a murmur, “anyone who’s ever even mentioned it have only the briefest and haziest descriptions. Some say they’re only meant to be seen by certain eyes, so they don’t make themselves clear until they are presented with those eyes.” 

Tahani has clearly wandered out of this conversation. She’s looking at Michael’s page boy oddly instead, who is looking mutely back with wine in hand. Jianyu didn’t typically drink wine, but here water was more precious than liquor so it would have to do.

He turns to look at the other two, but they’re no longer huddled close together. Eleanor has pulled away, and she’s staring right at Michael. Her eyes are open, silent, and he doesn’t trust the way they’re watching him. 

“Chidi, how far would you say Hamunaptra is from here?”

“A day’s ride, maybe less.”

“We’re setting off at dawn.”

“We?” Chidi asks weakly, in unison with Michael’s equally unenthusiastic deadpan tone.

“We could use another lore expert on our team. You can even protect it while you’re at it.”

In the firelight, Michael thinks he sees Chidi turn grey.

-

It’s not long before everyone is under the covers and the fire has been put out that he hears her. Sand is silent, but every human has distinct features about them, and Michael could pick out Eleanor’s breathing anywhere.

He is silent as well as he comes up behind her, and grips the reins she’s trying to unfasten. He hears her soft gasp, and in another second she’s turned a quarter in the space of his arms and has a knife yet again pressed to his throat. He looks down at her.

“Late night stroll?” He asks casually, feeling the blade’s edge move with his vocal chords. 

Eleanor’s eyes are hard little coals glaring up at him. She removes her blade once again, cautiously this time, debating within herself if she should. 

“You can have my cut. I’m out. He can take you the rest of the way.” She’s looking away from him now, down at the sand. His hand automatically grips her forearm before he even knows it’s happening. Her breath stutters inwards.

Michael has a few fleeting emotions. Fear. Panic. Bargaining. Denial. His mouth moves a million times before it opens seconds later with calculated resolve. This had always been a possibility.

“You’re leaving us?” He asks in his most devastated tone. “Eleanor… I don’t know if we can survive this without you. I don’t think they will. Not if you leave now.” She flinches in his arm, the reality slapping her in the face. It’s one thing to flee under cover of the dead of night, anonymity intact. It’s another to do this to someone else to their face. It’s a gamble he’s relying on.

“You only have to make it to the gates with us, I know. But we’ve come so far already, and it’s so dangerous. I mean, scorpions and thieves and snakes are everywhere!” His goody academic tone looks to be convincing her, and it’s also elevating in pitch which means they’re both aware the others might be stirring soon too. As if on cue, Eleanor shushes him.

“Okay, man, I won’t leave! I just…got spooked. I guess.” She looks down at the floor, to the side, anywhere but look at him. She’s holding something back, but doesn’t trust him enough to share it. Alright.

“How about I stay up with you, we can look at the sky together. I’m a little too anxious to sleep, anyway.” He lies. 

“Do you have a cigarette?”

They walk a little ways from the group, but not far enough they can’t see the fire. Michael watches Eleanor take a slow drag through the filter, breathing in smoke.

“Do you know the story of Hamunaptra?”

“Sure. Heard it last time I was here.” She says with reverie. She holds the cigarette between her thumb and index finger, just letting it hang when it’s not in use between her spread legs. “Dude was super possessive of his wife, who was actually fucking the wizard, and you don’t mess with a wizard. But you also don’t mess with a king. Guess who won that one?”

“Difficult to say,” Michael admits. “Legend says there is a book within the city’s temples that will raise the dead if the right words are spoken to it.”

“Zombie apocalypse your cup of tea?”

“It is also capable of raising particular types of dead.”

“Now you’re just being creepy.” Michael chuckles. Eleanor’s smile slashes across her face, unguarded and real. She holds her cigarette in an offer to Michael. He takes it and mirrors her. 

“So this book is what you want?”

“Among other things,” he says, puffing smoke out with each syllable.

“Other things,” She echoes, and he looks at her.

“Why are you afraid of the gates?” 

She’s not smiling anymore. She looks at the sky.

“Ever get the feeling you’re following a trap and should know better?”

He’s silent. He watches her.

“My,”she looks at the ground and pauses for a moment, “friend, once told me a story about a mountain village that disappeared hundreds of years ago.” She looks at Michael’s hands, and he gives her cigarette back. She looks up, closes her eyes, and breathes it in. 

“These people had lived in the same part of the mountains for centuries, since the mountains had existed. They didn’t do anything special. Goat herding, farming, weaving. Then one morning, they all woke up to find something had happened. There were a bunch of holes in the mountain.”

Michael purses his lips. Her eyelids flutter, as if she could see it clearly if she did so. As if recalling a memory.

“Only they weren’t just any kind of holes. They were shaped like people. People shaped. Even tiny ones, for the children. 

“And the people, of course, are freaked out. They’ve lived in these mountains for hundreds of years and nothing like that ever happened before. Rocks don’t do that. So the village shaman, he says, the mountains have evil spirits and the holes will lead them to bad things. Hell or whatever they believed in. To stay away from them. And the village people do, for a while. Except it’s hard not to notice a giant fucking person shaped like hole that looks exactly like you in your daily commute. First a kid goes missing in the village, and it takes them till sundown to realize what happened. So then the mom goes into her hole, trying to see if it’ll meet up with his. And that’s when her husband goes, and his mom, and so on. And even when they sleep, they still dream of their hole, their shape in the mountain, calling them, luring them in. 

Until one day, the village isn’t there anymore. It’s gone. It’s abandoned. The huts are empty, the cattle starve, and you just have the holes shaped like the people who were supposed to be there.”

“That’s quite an unsettling story,” Michael tells her when he’s certain she’s finished.

“When I close my eyes, I can see the gates.” She pushes her cigarette into the sand and grits it out. “And sometimes,” her eyelashes open and she watches him from the corner of her eye, “I think you’re there too.”

“Maybe you’re dreaming about tomorrow,” he says neutrally. She hums.

“Maybe.”

She doesn’t sleep that night. Neither does he.

-

Chidi is not a super enthused plus one party member, grousing at the crack of dawn. He has a few rough starts on the camel’s back, and finally manages to match paces with Eleanor. He echoes repeatedly of the heat until Eleanor throws a handful of sand at him and tells him to shut it. Michael can agree with him. He rides just a pace behind him and Eleanor, not close enough to be apart of the conversation but not far enough to be ignorant of it. 

“What made you decide to leave your library in the big city anyway?” Eleanor asks after they’d ridden long enough in a truce of silence, in her casual curious tone that was just her way of digging.

“Well, my father died, and it’s kind of a family tradition. Also my brother went to live in France, so they got stuck with me.”

“I feel that.”

“Oh, the French are marvelous aren’t they!” Tahani comes riding up beside them with a delighted grin. Chidi stares at her.

“Well they’re currently occupying my home country and herding my people on the streets, so no they’re not high in my social calendar right now.”

“Oh,” Tahani says with a reserved nod, “right.” She falls back beside Michael, and whispers to him, “Why did we hire such a buzzkill?” Michael smiles to himself and he can see Eleanor’s eyes try to glimpse a peek of them in confidence without looking as he leans to whisper in Tahani’s ear.

“We didn’t.”

“Oh. I suppose that’s true.” She mulls that over. 

“So you’ve never seen the gates you’re supposed to protect?” Michael says loud enough that the two in front of them know they’re meant to hear.

“I will admit this experience will be good for that reason. So I can have the access my father and brother have- had.”

“Believe me they’re not that impressive.” Eleanor says, giving Michael one long last look over her shoulder before galloping her camel ahead of them. 

-

“We need to make camp because it’s here.” Eleanor says with a great weariness.

“Where? I don’t see it.” Tahani dismounts and juts her lip out, squinting suspiciously at a patch of sand.

“It only makes itself known by moonlight, so you better hope it’s not overcast.” Tahani humphs, but begins the process of getting her bedding ready and having Jianyu assist her. 

Michael comes close to Eleanor, who is sharing her water with the librarian.

“Are you sure this is the place?” He squints around, looking for absolutely any visible landmark. There is none, however. Just endless expanse of sand and sky.

Eleanor isn’t looking around her at all. She’s looking at her camel, she’s looking at her water bottle.

“It’s here.” She says with a tight grimace. “You can do whatever you want with it after midnight, by then I’ll be gone.”

-

Eleanor says the ruins won’t show up until after the moon passes a certain point, and there’s no point losing sleep over it. Everyone takes this with a grain of salt. Jianyu and Tahani meander off to their pitched tents, Chidi reads one of his texts. 

Michael follows Eleanor, who is pacing a storm between the Camels and her tent.

“You really should rest,” He tells her, hand on her shoulder. She smells like the camels, warm and musty and perspiration. She looks up at him, again by moonlight, and tilts her head. Her face is open, calm. 

“I don’t want to be surprised by anything anymore than anyone else here does.”

“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” Michael assures her. She squints at him. 

“That’s what my last partner said. We were five. I don’t have partners anymore now.”She shrugs his hand off and walks past him, but he reaches for her wrist. 

“You haven’t slept in five days, Eleanor. I know. You have the traits of it.”

“What are you, my doctor?”

“Rest for half an hour. Nothing scary will happen in that time.”

“I’m going to sit by the fire and keep watch.” She tells him evenly. He sighs a compressed sigh and nods, follows her.

One by one, the lights go out around them. First, it’s the stars, blinking out one by one. Then the light coming from Tahani’s tent. Then Chidi’s candle. Then the fire before them. Eleanor is mumbling something, and she’s shaking her head and rubbing her eyes. But even Michael feels the pull of sleep, of rest. He welcomes himself to drift slowly into slumber. 

When waking comes, there are no people shaped holes in mountains. It’s not the end of the world as Eleanor would have feared.

It couldn’t have been more than half an hour, though maybe it was more, but Michael rubs the sleep from his eyes as it’s still dark. Only it’s not half as dark as it was.

He hears Tahani’s expansive and expressive gasp.

“This is it,” Tahani says with absolute wonder in her voice, looking up at the glimmering gates even as Eleanor is quickly recoiling.

“Yes.” Eleanor says at the same moment as Michael. Chidi gapes openly. 

The gates are giant stone monuments before them, alit in blue fire hieroglyphs and carvings. 

“The gateway to the underworld” Chidi recites. Moments later, they hear Eleanor’s camel take off. Michael would worry about that later. 

“Well Michael, I truly must thank you for this moment,” Tahani says, and Michael would smile if he wasn’t so busy staring at the fiery blue hieroglyphs like he was reading a letter from home. He should be paying attention to his surroundings, he might have seen the gun pointing at him. “Jason, do it.” 

A crack of a gunshot, and a bullet is lodged in his back, near his spine. 

“Gods!” That’s Chidi, and Michael really didn’t care to be hearing his voice right now.

“Fuck.” He says as he’s brought to his knees in shock. He looks down, his hand dazedly going to wear something is wet at the bottom of his shirt. It comes back unmistakably a dark red in the night.

He looks up to see Tahani standing over him.

“Really Michael, it’s been wonderful knowing you, but Jason and I have a little arrangement and you’re just not part of the cut,” 

“Jason?” 

“Of course you thought his name was Jianyu. He’s not complicated, see. And there’s just something about you that I don’t trust.”

She smirks and turns to walk away, with Jiany- Jason. 

“Sorry, Michael, but Tahani’s kinda paying my debts off so I gotta have her back?”

Michael stares at him dumbly. 

“I thought you were a mute,” he says, more angry with himself than anyone else right now. Jason shrugs and follows Tahani. 

Michael can overcome this. This is just a stepping stone, even as he sees them fade from the distance. And god how he hated his body right now.

“Gods gods gods” Chidi is repeating, and he seems frozen to one spot. Michael stares at him, in near awe of how someone could be less useful. 

“Shit.” A hand is pressing a bundle of fabric to his stomach. He looks down, and sees blonde hair he thought would never look back now looking up at him.

“Michael, stay with me.”

He blinks once, twice. She’s not an apparition. He curiously touches her ponytail. She smirks.

“You can buy me a drink later.”

“You need to get me across the gates.” He says calmly, though he can hear the croaking of his voice. Her face falters.

“No.”

“Eleanor,” he says with a strained confidence, “you need to get me across those gates if you want me to have any chance at surviving.” He tries to say each word one at a time, to stress their importance. 

Eleanor’s nostrils flare. She looks at the gates. She looks at a particular spot of the gate. Michael knows, and she should know too.

“Eleanor, you don’t have to be afraid of the gates. They won’t hurt you. Nothing here will ever hurt you,”

She stares at him intently, scanning his face as if for answers. Almost seemingly with no thought, she hefts him up. She helps him stumble, step by step, towards the blue lights.

“If you weren’t dying I’d want to kill you,” she tells him simply. 

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he says with a burgeoning knowing. 

At the foot of the gates, Eleanor looks like she might just toss him through. But instead she shoves him towards the markings. A bloody palm lands and streaks across the ancient stone, and red mixes over yellow. 

“Why is that there?” 

Michael sees what she sees. Blonde haired figure with piercing blue eyes, shifting in and out of focus constantly, and eyes that did not look at anyone but Eleanor. Much as a mirror does.

“Because she’s you.” He says with a punctured stomach.

“I am not an ancient Egyptian and that makes _no_ sense buddy.”

Michael stares at her. He takes her hand and pulls her forward, into and out of time, into their world. 

Michael gasps, breathing air anew. 

“Christ that was a long one,” he says without the pain of a punctured stomach. He looks down and sees only a stained shirt. He snaps that away quickly. 

He looks over to see Eleanor on all fours, heaving. He looks around to find the temples, and can make out the figure of Jason and Tahani running for their lives from one of the cursed tombs. Good. 

He walks over to Eleanor and holds out a hand to her hunched form. She slaps it away and rubs the back of her hand across her mouth. 

“I’m glad I could find you this time.”

“What the _shit_ , Michael. Are you the reincarnated wizard or something?” He flexes his eyebrows and fiddles his bowtie.

“No, I’m just of an underworld. Not this one, but another one, and I needed to find a gate to get back home." He begins to raise his thumb to his finger. "But I needed to find you first.”

-

* * *

"He takes her in his arms.  
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks  
this is a lie, so he says in the end  
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you  
which seems to him  
a more promising beginning, more true.”

- _A Myth of Devotion_ , Louise Glück

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> End. Thank you for reading! This has been sitting in my drafts for over a year now, and I realized nothing I did with it after fit the mood I was trying to build. This felt like its own weird natural conclusion, drawn out of something like a dream. Feel free to make your own conclusions about where the story finds them after.


End file.
